Sciencetext Tips & Tricks

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Put Facebook on a Blog Diet

September 17th, 2009 · by David Bradley >> 11 Comments

For a while now, I’ve been letting Facebook gorge itself on the Sciencebase blog. It grabs the full-fat feed and gulps it down in one go. Well, that was never a very satisfying experience for me as a blogger, especially as Facebook ignores formating like the pullout quotes, thumbnails, and other niceties. Moreover, anyone commenting on the Facebook version of my blog post isn’t sharing their comments with the Sciencebase regular reader.

Thankfully, if you’re sick to the back teeth of feeding Facebook, you can put it on a diet thanks to a superficially simple solution – Feed Facebook, Leave Facebook.

Simple to install, and easy to activate, this plugin generates an “excerpts-only” version of your feed without messing with the full-feed RSS newsfeed to which your blog readers subscribe to.

Now, when you post a blog entry, Facebook only gets to see the intro and spits out a link back to your blog. It’s a a little taster for your Facebook friends and if they want to comment they can do so on your blog, rather than fattening up the Facebook database.

Of course, you can use the newsfeed lite URL generated by the plugin for purposes other than controlling a greedy Facebook account. You could present it as the URL for your site for syndication services to which you don’t want to give the full-text feed. There may also be potential subscribers who prefer partial feeds so you could offer it as an abbreviated feed for those readers.

I’m sure there are disadvantages to putting Facebook on a blog diet, but I haven’t noticed any yet, and am happy to say my Facebook account is now looking very trim and svelt thanks to it noshing on newsfeed lite.

11 responses so far ↓

  • David Bradley // Sep 17, 2009 at 6:00 am

    Put Facebook on a Blog Diet – http://bit.ly/11RAhD

  • Zath // Sep 26, 2009 at 6:53 pm

    Thanks for highlighting this plugin, I’ve been wanting a way of integrating my blog posts into my Facebook fan page without having the whole thing displayed and missing out on people visiting my site.

    Does these excerpts and links appear as actual fan page updates or are they only posted onto a notes-style page which your fans wouldn’t receive an update about in their news feed?

    Thanks!

  • David Bradley // Sep 27, 2009 at 10:10 am

    You could use the feed URL anywhere you can run an RSS…doesn’t even have to be Facebook. The plugin just creates a version of your feed that shows only excerpts.

  • Zath // Sep 27, 2009 at 7:22 pm

    Have now got this set up on a couple of my sites, hopefully it’ll bring in a bit more traffic from Facebook, thanks again David! :)

  • David Bradley // Sep 28, 2009 at 8:45 am

    Happy to help! Good luck with it.

  • David Bradley // Oct 15, 2009 at 5:30 pm

    Well, my plan to persuade Facebook friends to actually visit the site instead of simply leaving comments on my full-text posts on Facebook doesn’t seem to have worked. Stats show that visits to the Sciencebase blog from the Facebook domain have actually dropped significantly since installing the plugin and using the excerpt feed. So I’ve switched back to full text mode for now to see whether syndicating sciencebase to my Facebook page once again boosts the traffic to the site from Facebook.

  • Zath // Oct 15, 2009 at 10:11 pm

    Interesting findings! I’ve not got that comparison to look at and haven’t properly tried to promote the fan page as yet, however I’m wondering if there are one too many clickthrus from a Facebook user’s news feed to get to your blog using this method – perhaps having a system that auto posts a “facebook link update” showing the post title and simply a straight URL would be easiler and quicker for people to use?

    What do you think?

  • David Bradley // Oct 16, 2009 at 7:29 am

    Make it more like a tweet in other words rather than showing an excerpt…maybe I’ll try that next, thanks.

  • Zath // Oct 16, 2009 at 7:36 am

    Yeah, but the question is how, I’m guessing the Twitter application for Facebook for re-publishing tweets wouldn’t work with a fan page?

    I’ll have to look into later today!

  • Asdas // Dec 4, 2009 at 6:14 am

    Have now got this set up on a couple of my sites, hopefully it’ll bring in a bit more traffic from Facebook, thanks David!

  • David Bradley // Dec 4, 2009 at 7:53 am

    I’ve since found that it doesn’t and have reverted to the standard practice. Actually, the thing that brings in more traffic from any social media site is to be actively engaged with your contacts on those services, treat them like friends rather than statistics, make it personable and personal.

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